Cameron spent £1,900 entertaining the Queen

David Cameron spent nearly £1,900 over three months entertaining the Queen, model Claudia Schiffer and other guests at his Chequers retreat.

The Cabinet Office has released the prime minister’s bill for official hospitality at the grace and favour residence between January and March last year.

The disclosure, in response to a freedom of information request by the Press Association, came despite the department previously having insisted that it did not store such material “in a way that readily facilitates extraction”.

A list of people hosted by Cameron at Chequers at public expense is published quarterly, but no costs have been given for the hospitality until now.

The latest FoI request asked for details of spending on events attended by the named Chequers guests between January and March 2014.

The Cabinet Office did not produce the itemised breakdown requested but it did reveal that the overall bill for the quarter was £1,863.

It is not clear whether the sum includes staff costs or whether that is covered by the annual grant – totalling £674,000 in 2012-13 – paid by the government to keep Chequers running.

With 29 guests having been entertained, the average spend per head was around £64. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh dined at Chequers last February, their first visit to the Buckinghamshire pile in four decades.

Schiffer and her film producer husband, Matthew Vaughn, the Marks & Spencer chief executive, Marc Bolland, and Cameron’s Tory ally Lord Feldman were also among the names.

Chequers was left to the nation by Lord and Lady Lee of Fareham nearly a hundred years ago as a country bolthole for serving premiers.